I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

President Obama is holding on to Eric Holder as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, The Post has learned.

The newly re-elected president asked his controversial attorney general to stay for the second term, and Holder has agreed despite enduring a firestorm of criticism from Republican lawmakers.

Because, of course, now that the election is over Democratic lawmakers no longer need to worry about offending the sensibilities of Mexican-American voters (I’ve had folks argue privately that they never were worried about offending said sensibilities; I see their point, but do not share it). So if you were hoping for any kind of justice, here, stop hoping that the Democrats will be involved. It’s Issa or nobody, at this point.

Yesterday, Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, House Foreign Affairs chair, more or less unloaded on the administration for their stonewalling on Operation Fast & Furious. Below are some handy links, audio, text, and two embeddable videos of said unloading: feel free to pass them around. Particularly the ones that are in Spanish.

I know that a quick reading of the story might suggest it – short version; one Border Agent was killed and another wounded at a shootout this morning at the Brian Terry Station* in Arizona – but when Fox is referring to Fast & Furious guns found on the scene the network is referring to the 2010 Terry shooting. It’s a breaking story; presumably they’ll clean it up a little in a little while.

More info here and here. Prayers and good wishes to the families of the victims.

Moe Lane

PS: Fire Eric Holder.

*Named after US Border Agent Brian Terry, who was killed in a shootout with drug gangs in 2010. Guns on the scene were traced to the government’s infamous Fast & Furious program, which was a program that disastrously allowed guns to be illegally resold to drug cartels and other violent criminals all over the American super-continent. The Obama administration has thus far refused to hold anyone in its administration accountable for our responsibility in the murder of hundreds of people.

The below is not the entire Univision Operation Fast & Furious expose: it’s merely about ten minutes of it. Ten very graphic, very infuriating, and very embarrassing ten minutes of it. Don’t watch it if you have a physical/mental problem with seeing people being murdered on-screen, and for real:

It’s a useful primer for what happened: which is to say, Mexican drug cartels decided to buy guns from US shops and the US government (ATF Special Agent William Newell* is mentioned by name, but he’s not the only one caught up in this mess) decided to not only let them; they decided to track illegal gun sales by waiting to see when and where guns known to have been sold illegally showed up at Mexican crime scenes.

Please pause for a moment to think about it. And possibly participate in a calming exercise. (more…)

…that I spent the time period from 7 to 8 being heavily impressed with Univision’s coverage of Operation Fast & Furious, despite the fact that I don’t speak Spanish and I was counting on people doing running translations for me. I will have to sit down and watch the whole thing again once it’s subtitled, but this is my first takeaway: Univision made a compelling case that the US government is stonewalling any kind of meaningful investigation into what the hell happened, and it did so all the more powerfully by not taking a partisan political side.

But I will. I am with Paul Ryan on this: FIRE ERIC HOLDER. NOW. And note that we’ve all been saying this for over a year at this point.

Background: the Spanish-language media organization Univision has apparently been building up quite the head of steam over Operation Fast & Furious, which was an operation where we blithely let guns get handed over to Mexican narco-terrorist gangs with precisely zero oversight, hesitation, or interest in what said gangs would do with said weapons. What they did with them, of course, was to use those guns to murder Mexican nationals. The administration is stonewalling the investigation into all this (particularly the investigation into US Border Agent Brian Terry’s murder, as OF&F guns showed up at the murder scene); and Univision is promising a long, hard look at the ongoing debacle tomorrow.

…only, it’s not really one. It’s a press conference about Project Gunrunner, which was/is our general program for stopping illegal weapons traffic to Mexico. If you watch the video, you’ll see that they’re talking about tracing the guns (Operation Fast & Furious did not), coordinating with the Mexican authorities (Operation Fast & Furious did not), and generally maintaining government oversight over the entire operation (if you believe the administration, Operation Fast & Furious did not). Not really the same thing, in other words. (more…)

…you can find it here. After C-SPAN finishes processing it, people should be able to clip and embed sections.

Meanwhile: Trey Gowdy probably had the single most epic exhibition (H/T: @DLoesch) of angry, truly righteous indignation, but he had a lot of competition. There are a lot of Republicans out there who stopped listening to administration excuses at about the time that it became clear that the Department of Justice GOT PEOPLE KILLED.

He hates his life – or at least, he’s about to hate his life. You see, if Congress votes today to hold US Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress today for Holder’s stonewalling on providing documents on the botched Operation Fast & Furious botched gunrunning scandal* then Mr. Machen is apparently the lucky individual who gets to bring charges up for a grand jury. Assuming, of course, that Holder doesn’t blink before then and give House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa the documents that Issa’s been demanding ever since Holder got caught lying about the Department of Justice’s oversight of Operation Fast & Furious.

All of this puts Machen in an absolutely no-win situation: if the US Attorney brings charges, Machen will get an unbelievable amount of push-back from both the administration (which will be passive-aggressive) and the DC local political structure (which will just be aggressive). But if Ronald Machen does not bring charges then his career is over; the DC federal power structure values obedience to Congressional prerogatives a heck of a lot more than they value obedience to Presidential ones. Presidents are ephemeral; even the successful ones have less than a decade of true power. Congress endures, and it gets mean when it’s crossed. (more…)

K, here’s the background. CJ Ciaramella is a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon, and he emailed the Department of Justice to find out if they had any response to the allegations being featured in Kate Pavlich’s latest book on the Operation Fast & Furious scandal (Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up). Specifically, the allegation that there was a third gun found at the scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s murder that could be traced back to that DOJ/DEA botched gunrunning operation; and that the existence of this third gun was being covered up in order to protect a confidential informant. And let me note in passing: I don’t care how highly-placed this alleged informant could be; his or her needs do not take precedence over the needs of Agent Terry’s surviving loved ones, or indeed the survivors of anybody that the US government helped murder by freely letting guns get illegally sold to Mexican narco-terrorists.

But let us move back to the main point: Ciaramella emailed the DoJ for their response to this issue… and the DoJ’s official response, in the form of one Office of Public Affairs spokeswoman Katie Dixon? Go read Media Matters for America (MMfA).

So, we now what the priorities are when it comes to American law enforcement officials acting badly. Secret Service agents who patronize, then refuse to pay, Colombian prostitutes? People end up getting fired, investigated, and generally have their careers blighted, within days. DEA/DOJ officials who put cop-killing (and Mexican-civilian-killing) guns into the hands of Mexican narco-terrorist gangs? No firings. The bare minimum of non-Congressional investigations. Certainly no career blighting. It’s an… interesting… contrast, especially since nobody died at the hands of government fools in the first case and quite a lot of people died at the hands of government fools in the second. (more…)

If you don’t have time to read it, let me summarize: Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s attempts to utterly stonewall Congress’s investigation of Operation Fast & Furious has been done in a fashion that would, if done by any organization not aligned with the Obama administration, result in a series of raids and subpoenas by the Justice Department. The entire structure is rotten, from the top down, and Congress is rapidly approaching the point where criminal contempt citations of top officials (including the Attorney General) will be issued. Historically, that’s the point where the executive branch throws in its cards and goes along with the legislative branch.

But let me add this: I am not actually confident that Attorney General Holder and President Obama realize that they’re over a barrel, here. I know that a lot of people have been impatiently waiting for this story to hit the front page, stinks and all, but good scandals take time to ferment. If Congress is going to issue contempt citations because the Justice Department won’t give up documents, and if the administration lets them go through with it, there is absolutely no way that the media won’t go on a full-court press about the Attorney General being held in contempt by Congress. And before anybody thinks that this will be a net positive for the administration, let me remind you of something: people died because of administration incompetence, and the administration then tried to cover it up. That makes this particular scandal quite a bit different than just about every other Washingtonian scandal of the last forty years.